


Pipes

by ThoseFiveChicks



Category: Maggot Boy
Genre: Everyone Is Alive, Horror AU, Multi, but not happy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-28
Updated: 2016-09-28
Packaged: 2018-08-18 07:15:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8153564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThoseFiveChicks/pseuds/ThoseFiveChicks
Summary: There's something rotten in Sovereign City. Horror AU.





	

“ _In those days secrets were well kept._ ”

–Stuart Symington

  


It had started getting colder in the past few weeks. The changing of the seasons was a subtle one in Sovereign city, and summer had blended so seamlessly into Autumn that, until the first flakes of snow fell on November twelfth, nobody would realize that the warmer days were well and truly behind them. The chill settling on bare arms was light enough to be ignored, and the only students wearing jackets at Sovereign city high protested loudly that it was ‘only because their parents had made them.’

Jeremiah Jones, or ‘Davey’ to anyone who didn’t want to have their nose broken, crunched loudly through the leaves that had drifted to an uneasy sort of stop piled against the curb. It had been windy earlier, but by this point it had died down to an occasional wafting breeze, not enough to budge the massive leaf piles that Davey was currently destroying.

“Look, all I’m saying is that it looked totally fake,” Davey said, tossing a look back down the sidewalk to where his friend Sam was walking, with a significantly smaller amount of enthusiasm. He knew that normally she’d be three steps ahead of him, not only stomping on the leaves but kicking huge drifts of them up into the street, but today she was burdened with the exhaustion built of an all-nighter studying and a caffeine crash an hour earlier.

Sam rolled her eyes, and her irritated huff stirred her faded bangs. She’d complained multiple times that week that she needed to re-dye her hair, and soon, and Davey had kept it to himself that he liked how it looked faded. Saying that, of course, would not only imply that he _dis_ liked it when it had recently been dyed– untrue– but also that he liked how her hair looked at any time at all– true, but not a truth he’d ever admit to, not even at gunpoint.

Besides, it was _her_ hair. She could do whatever she wanted.

“It was _supposed_ to look fake, Davey. They built the _whole story_ up to the point where he could summon his familiar for the first time– even the _best_ CGI wouldn’t have been enough after all that. If it looked a little fake, then it was like he hadn’t quite gotten it quite right yet, y’know?”

“It was _lazy animation_ ,” Davey argued, kicking into the leaves for emphasis with a particularly loud _shoof_. “And I would know. Resident artist-in-chief, remember?”

“You spraypaint and sketch, Davey. It’s not the same thing.”

“Says you.”

“Yeah, _says me_.”

A comfortable silence descended on the two friends as Davey continued his loud tromp along the edge of the street and Sam stifled a yawn behind him. Honestly, he should have studied for the same test Sam had been cramming for the night prior, but he’d completely forgotten and had a feeling his grade would reflect that.

 _Just one more day_ , he told himself. _Then it’s the weekend and you don’t have to worry about any of this for like. . . two days_.

The asphalt under his feet abruptly dropped away, smooth road giving way to a bumpier one of packed dirt. To get home from school, he and Sam had to cut through what used to be a construction zone, but after over ten years of inactivity was mostly a great place to take your kids sledding on the giant, abandoned mounds of dirt. Once they were covered with snow, naturally, though Davey had once tried seeing if he could skateboard down one during the summer and had nearly been hit by a bus.

There wasn’t much _to_ the construction site. There were no abandoned cranes, no hulking dump trucks, not even a barbed wire fence that you’d have to duck through a hole in in order to pass through. The only thing that marked it as different from the rest of the city was the expanse of open earth, as well as a ditch alongside the unfinished road that more than one drunk teenager had toppled into in the middle of the night. It wasn’t deep enough to break any necks, luckily, but it was more than enough to embarrass the hell out of whoever woke up there the following morning. Today there was a tiny trickle of water running along the bottom of the ditch, too small to even be called a stream, with the occasional leaf joining the journey to a drainage pipe further down the road. That was the only _really_ unusual thing about the construction site– the drainage pipe was less a pipe in the traditional sense and more of a giant, water stained concrete tube that everyone in the neighborhood had grown up incorporating into their outdoor games. If you needed a fort, you used the pipe. Needed a place to hold a ‘secret meeting’? You used the pipe. Even if it got gross further back and choked with a decade’s worth of dead leaves, you could still use the first ten feet for pretty much anything you wanted.

“You at least have to agree that it was a good movie,” Sam said at last. Then she yawned again. Davey had been counting, more or less, and that had been about five yawns since they’d left school five minutes ago.

“ _You_ at least have to agree that you need to get some sleep,” Davey countered. He slowed down, hooking a thumb in his backpack strap as he waited for Sam to catch up. She looked exhausted. Her uniform was rumpled in the ever-popular ‘ _I’ve been wearing this since yesterday_ ’ style, and her blinks were practically slow-motion, each look at her surroundings a confused squint, as if she was questioning why exactly she’d resisted the urge to crawl into bed that morning and never ever leave.

“Planning on it,” Sam replied, and yawned once more. Then she fixed him with a slightly more alert look and a tired little smirk. “But don’t try to change the subject, Jeremiah Jones. It was a good movie.”

Davey rolled his eyes, and watched Sam’s exhausted gaze slip to the construction site behind him without comment. “Fine. It wasn’t _that_ bad. The presentation was sloppy, but it had good. . .”

Davey hesitated, fishing for the right word. Sam seemed to perk up beside him.

“Body,” she said.

“That’s it,” Davey agreed, nodding. “It had good–”

“ _No_ , Davey,” Sam interrupted him, and it was only then that Davey realized her ‘perking up’ had been accompanied by an abrupt change in tone.

She stopped walking, and Davey pulled to a halt a moment later.

“Body. _Dead_ body, Davey. In the ditch. _Right behind you_.”

For a second, nothing registered in Davey’s mind. Sam’s words still hadn’t quite clicked even when he started to turn around, and the only thing that pulled anything resembling a prompt response from him was the fact that, in his experience, whenever anyone said the words ‘ _behind you_ ’ in that tone of voice, you had _better_ be ready to haul ass in a second, even if it was only to avoid your little brother with a water pistol.

“Oh God,” Davey breathed, something deep inside of him running cold. Sam was tense behind him.

The body in the ditch was tall and gangly, lying just in front of the ditch’s drainage pipe, directly in the path of the tiny trickle of water running beside the road. The body seemed abnormally pale, but other than that, the only sign that it _wasn’t_ just some unfortunate kid sleeping it off was how the water around its head turned dark red as it burbled around the body. There was mud splattered across its features and clothes, and its hair was slicked against its head, soaked through and matted by blood.

Davey remembered to breathe at roughly the same time Sam did.

“Call nine-one-one,” Sam blurted, a half-second before it occurred to Davey to say the same thing.

“ _You_ call nine-one-one!” he hissed. “My phone’s been dead since third period!”

There was a lot going through his mind just then. Terror, for one thing. Actually, _mostly_ terror. While part of him was saying that whoever it was at the bottom of the ditch had probably just slipped during the night and hit his head, there was a much larger, more instinctive part telling him that where there was a dead body, there was danger. His heart was going a thousand miles an hour, like it had already decided on the ‘fight’ part of ‘fight or flight,’ and though he could see his hands shaking he couldn’t feel a single thing outside of his own panicked mind.

Numbly, he registered Sam fumbling for her phone with the same shaking hands as he had. He couldn’t look back at her, couldn’t tear his gaze away from the body in the ditch– this was, what, a block away from his house? Less? He and Parker and Sam and, grudgingly, Micah had all been playing out here just that summer, quickly joined by Bastian and the rest of his friends as well. If he blinked, he could see Parker with his lipstick war paint crouched in the concrete pipe behind the body, a grin on his face and battle plans scrawled on the wall behind him in playground chalk. It was an infinitely different scene than the wet, miserable, jarring one before him.

He swallowed. He could hear Sam talking frantically into her phone, but it was dim, muffled. It wasn’t that he was having trouble hearing, it was that he was having trouble paying attention– his whole world had narrowed down to that still figure lying a few feet below him.

“I’m going down there,” he mumbled. Sam didn’t hear him, most likely in the same frigid haze as he was, but she sure as hell noticed when he stepped closer to the edge of the ditch, starting to climb down the side of the rough incline.

“ _Davey!_ What are you– why– I’m already calling nine-one-one, why are you–”

“I wanna see who it is,” Davey said grimly. What he didn’t say– and what Sam knew he _meant_ – was, ‘ _I want to see if it’s anyone we know._ ’

It wasn’t. He knew that even before he reached the bottom of the ditch, knew that he’d have recognized that hair if he’d seen it anywhere before. It looked frazzled even through the wetness, bleach-fried and dyed three different colors– colors barely distinguishable through the mud and blood. Black, white, and blue. Only the black stayed the same behind the crimson staining it, the white turned the same grisly color and the blue went a sort of mucky brown-purple, matching the purple bruises that dotted the body’s neck and jaw. Most of its skin was covered– a long-sleeved shirt and jacket paired with black jeans made sure of that. But its face, abnormally pale though it was, looked almost. . . normal. Like the corpse was sleeping, rather than dead.

Davey realized belatedly that he was crouched over the body now, close enough that he could see the drops of water in the corpse’s eyelashes, the individual chunks of sand in the mud smeared across its face. Close enough to touch it, if he had wanted to, despite the fact that the very thought made his stomach do sick little flips.

There was a name printed in the back of the corpse’s jacket, marker over the tag that had doubtless been scrawled there by some loving parent. Davey couldn’t see all of the name, not past the water and the mud and the body’s blood-soaked hair, and his first instinct was to tug at the collar of the jacket, to see if he could read the whole name. He _had_ come down to see who the corpse was, after all. He reached out without even thinking, and as he did so his fingers brushed the side of the body’s neck. He flinched, almost drew his hand back. . . and stopped.

The corpse’s skin was cold and clammy to the touch, wet from however long it had spent lying in the half-inch of water down here and just as pale as the face had been. But there was something else, something. . .

“No, yeah,” Sam babbled above him, “We were– we were just walking home, and, and–”

“Sam,” Davey called, fingers pressed firmly to the corpse’s throat. Sam stopped speaking, looked down at him, and he met her gaze.

“Tell them to send an ambulance,” he told her. “He’s still alive.”

**Author's Note:**

> Welp, figured I'd post this in a more chapter-friendly format. Also so I don't have to keep editing in all the italics when I post to tumblr. Mostly that.
> 
> Strap in, kids!


End file.
